Safari market share grew to 4.03 percent in November

Safari use has grown 45 percent over the last year, according to new numbers …

New browser numbers from Market Share (Net Applications) have come out for November 2006, and they show good things for Safari, OS X's default web browser. Safari use grew 2.5 percent between October and November of this year (from 3.93 percent to 4.03 percent), and shows an almost 45 percent increase over the Safari numbers from November of 2005. Back then, Safari use was at 2.78 percent of the overall browser market.

In other news, Market Share's numbers show that Internet Explorer use continues to decline and Firefox continues to rise. And the trees continue to grow, the flowers continue to bloom (somewhere in the world—not in Chicago), and the sky is still blue. Seriously though, IE use fell 6.32 percent between November 2005 and November 2006, but still stays the frontrunner in the browser war at 80.65 percent of the market. Firefox grew 52.7 percent in the last year to 13.5 percent of the market. IE, Firefox, and Safari are still the top three browsers in the market.

Because of Safari's position as the default browser for the Mac, it is often used as a metric for the growing number of Mac users on the web (and in general). However, Switch To A Mac is quick to point out that many Mac users use other browsers (such as Firefox, Omniweb, and Camino, to name a few) and so the numbers are not always entirely accurate in that respect.